Hollow Empire

by Sam Hawke

  He blinked, looking down, and with a horrible twist in my chest I saw wet tracks on his cheeks. I took a breath and seized one of his hands, squeezed it. “Tain. This isn’t the first time in your life you’ve been an idiot and it’s not likely to be the last. But we can go over this later. Right now, we need to know if you could have told her anything in these little chats, anything at all she could have used. Sometimes the assassin seemed to know where we’d be when there was only a very small group of people who knew—”

  “No,” he said firmly. “No, I swear. I never told her anything. I just … sort of pretended to want her advice about things. General things, never specifics.” He chanced a look at Kalina’s burning glare and hastily added, “And I never took it. I just thought she might let something slip about who her allies were, maybe try to push me into making decisions benefiting one of our neighbors or something. Or I thought if I could appeal to her moral side, or even her self-interest, she might sell them out. She’d been in there for a long time, and I figured she’d think no one was coming for her, no grand rescue. What good did it do her to stay loyal to someone she’d already betrayed once anyway?”

  “What good?” Kalina stood up, but her whole body shook, wilted, suddenly drained of energy. “To ruin us, of course. Maybe you’re right and she doesn’t hate the country, maybe she doesn’t feel any real loyalty to whoever paid her—I’d believe that easy enough. But she hates us, she hates me and Jov, and that’s been enough to sustain her in prison and in those mines, and all this time she’s been picking at anyone she could reach, trying to get her revenge.”

  “Lini—”

  “No.” She turned her back on him, her breath short and raspy. “Jov’s right. We don’t have time for this. You either have to help us convince the Council to cancel the ceremony tonight, or at the very least, you have to stay away. Fake an illness. We’ll bloody give you one if you need.” She shot him an extremely fierce look, but was distracted by a bout of coughing. Worry pierced my shock and anxiety for a moment; she couldn’t have a lung attack now, of any time. I hobbled over to her and she shook me off impatiently. “I’m fine.”

  We both turned back to Tain. He looked drained too, but any sign of tears had gone. He looked very grave. “I’m not canceling the closing. You had to know I was going to say that. Even if there was time, which there isn’t, we have all our allies here, we have thousands of guests. And if our enemies have people in the Order Guards and the blackstripes and fortunes know wherever else, we’d only be putting off the problem anyway. They can strike whenever they want. I’m not ruining an event we spent months, and a goodly portion of the treasury, setting up. We’re still a small country around bigger military powers. This karodee shows we are strong, we’re united, and this city can offer something like nowhere else in the world. We can’t just be an indulgent capital that got torn apart in a civil war. We have to be a beacon again, we have to matter, or sooner or later we’re going to get swallowed up by an empire or something like it.” He shook his head. “Aven’s manipulative, you know as well as anyone. If she told you something was planned for tonight, if they’ve been toying with us, leaving us clues, giving signals, how do you know the point isn’t to make us cancel the ceremony and ruin the festival? They want me dead; there’s a lot of easier ways to do it than something this public. Someone cunning enough to try to discredit you the way they’ve been doing is playing a long game, Jov.” He stood. “People are waiting for us. We can’t cancel.”

  “And you? Will you go?”

  “I’ll go,” he said, and my heart sank at the finality in his voice. Was this, too, some form of punishment he was imposing on himself? “But I’ll take my Captain’s advice on the best way to thwart any plans someone might have. I’ll do everything I’m told. And you’re right about the other leaders having armed guards, so I won’t watch the ceremony from the viewing box with them. I’ll, I don’t know, I’ll surprise some of the ordinary citizens by turning up in the regular seating or something.”

  “We could stop you,” my sister said coldly. “If we wanted to.”

  He blinked, and the look of surprise was chased by one of betrayal.

  “We wouldn’t,” I said, and invested it with all my sincerity, because the Chancellor had to be able to trust their proofer. Always, without hesitation. The proofer takes the harm. Never causes it.

  There was a knock at Tain’s study door. Erel waited there, dressed more finely than I’d ever seen him, his stray puff of hair even tamed for the occasion. “Honored Chancellor, the others are getting anxious,” he said, peering curiously at me and Kalina, taking in our flushed faces and the palpable tension in the room. “Can I say you’re nearly done here?”

  Tain was looking furiously at Kalina, something I couldn’t remember him ever doing before. “Yeah,” he said, turning his back. “Yeah, we’re done.”

  * * *

  Much of my life was spent with an elevated pulse, my brain trying to convince me something terrible was going to happen, might already have happened, and it was probably caused by something I did or failed to do. It was almost a relief to feel the usual sickness in my stomach, the tight chest, the physical symptoms of dread, and know they were not the product of my mind but a normal reaction. The dread, this time, was well justified.

  We found Hadrea before we reached our apartments, approaching from the quarry pass with her hair blowing wild and her eyes bright. Her presence gave me heart. Here was one person I would not have to convince of the danger; she listened, frowning and attentive, while we outlined what we knew.

  “He is not wrong about the blackstripes,” she said, brow furrowed. “You cannot keep him safe if his bodyguards are compromised. So we must act as if they can be trusted because there is no hope if they cannot.” She scratched a hand through her hair, which was unbound by her usual scarf and had caught in knots and snarls in the wind. Only then did I notice she was not wearing the traditional Darfri garb.

  “Where have you been, anyway? Aren’t you supposed to be doing something at the ceremony?” I asked, distracted. “With the other Speakers?”

  A hardness stiffened her face, just for a moment, but then she affected a relaxed smile and shook her head. “No. I am going to help you stop whatever is planned for tonight.” She put a hand on my arm. “Do not worry, Jovan.” My sense of relief grew. Despite her somewhat disheveled appearance, and the air of excess energy that rolled off her, Hadrea’s confidence and competence was a balm to my rising anxiety. Together, the three of us would figure this out.

  But Kalina had a strange tone to her voice when she said, “One possibility is that Aven has managed to rile up some of the Darfri in the city. She might be using them as part of the disruption tonight.” Hadrea was shaking her head but Kalina continued flatly, almost as if she were reading from a script from which she couldn’t deviate. “You said yourself there are unhappy people, especially unhappy young people, in the city. There are strange things happening to spirits out on the estates. Jovan saw someone who seemed to be using fresken at that party. We can’t rule out the possibility that some of them might be part of this.”

  “Yes, we can,” Hadrea said, a flare of anger and defensiveness in the answer, but she did not look directly at either of us. “There are people who are dissatisfied, yes, and who desire more change, and yes those who do not consider An-Ostada an appropriate teacher, but they are not any risk to the Chancellor.”

  “They burned down a boat,” Kalina said, and Hadrea did look at her then; something passed between them, knife-edge sharp. “What if they did that on Aven’s orders?”

  “It was not that,” she said, her mouth hard and barely moving as she answered. A faint color change was swelling up her neck and into her cheeks.

  “You can’t know that, though,” Kalina said, overly reasonably, “unless you know the people who did it. You don’t know the people who did it, do you?”

  Her hands tightened into fists and my sister looked at Hadrea with the har
shest expression I’d ever seen her turn in Hadrea’s direction. And I knew, immediately, with a sour, hot taste in the back of my throat, that here was another thing I’d not noticed, another thing Kalina had deduced and I had missed. Or ignored. Because there was some part of me—a small, honest part—that knew I had felt something was off when she was first accused, and in the way she had responded when I brought it up, and chosen not to tug on that string and follow the feeling. I hadn’t wanted to because I had known there was a chance I wouldn’t like where it led.

  “You were with them,” I said quietly, and she shrugged and looked away. I grabbed her arm. A strange surge of emotion flared up inside me as if it had been ignited by the touch; I felt anger, confusion, fear, all white-hot. “The group who lit the fire, you were with them. Why? What were you thinking?”

  “I told you An-Ostada had driven some of our group out of training,” she said, pulling her arm free. “I could not find you after the ceremony and I found them, and they were … angry.” Her tone, surprisingly, was defensive, almost beseeching. “You know what masquerade night is like, Jovan. Everyone was drinking, eating karodee cakes, and then we were just … experimenting, I suppose. Seeing what we could do.” She hesitated, rubbing her hands together, and my heart thundered in my chest and the white-hot rage slipped out of me like an unplugged basin.

  My voice sounded hollow as I said, “What do you mean, experimenting?”

  She pressed her lips together, her jaw tight. After a moment she said, “I told you once that sometimes the Speakers used babacash to help communicate with the spirits. It loosens the hold the conscious world has on you, and makes you more amenable to seeing the secondworld.”

  “I remember.” She had dosed herself with the toxic plant to attempt connection with the great water spirit Os-Woorin to seek his help, and then to subdue him; Salvea and I had given the same to the other Speakers at the lake that day. “And you remember it’s poisonous, right?”

  “Yes. But some of the—” She broke off, then tried again. “It had been suggested in our training group, not by An-Ostada, that there might be other substances that could help us. Not just to access the secondworld and communicate with the spirits and seek their favor, but to share and use the fresken of the land, the way I did that day. The big feats the Speakers among the rebels performed in the siege are very difficult, exhausting, possible only with coordinated effort and intense emotional investment. They speculated babacash, or something like it, might make it easier to access.”

  Something about the way she said “something like it” made my skin prickle, and Kalina clearly had the same idea. “What kind of substance are you talking about?” she asked.

  Hadrea’s hands were threaded tight together and she looked away from us. This deceptiveness from her, of all people, someone who was honest to a fault, turned my insides cold. “There are other things available that change how you are thinking and experiencing the world. Other substances. An-Ostada forbids talk of such things, because it does not fit the order she has determined that we should learn.” A bitter twist of her lips, not really a smile. There was a long pause. “Void,” she said at last. “Speakers can use it. We found it helps you reach the right emotional state, and to make connections with the living things around you. It is like babacash, but not. Babacash weakens your hold on reality so you can better understand the connections between things. This…” She took a deep breath in through her nose, like she was breathing in a delicious scent. “This makes me the connection. I felt … more.”

  Kalina was staring at her, eyes narrowed, staring as if she could decipher Hadrea like a line of badly printed text in a book. “You know the physics said people have already died using this stuff. And you know the Hands are tied up in its distribution, using it to fund their operations. Why would you take it?”

  “And the boat?” I covered my face with my hands, dragged them down my cheeks, trying to smear the whole conversation away. “What was that? Some kind of prank? We’ve been in Council arguing these supposed Darfri attacks aren’t real, accusing people of sowing discord! How many of those things were actually true?”

  “It was just a boat!” she retorted. Her pupils were huge. I suddenly wondered if she had taken the drug more often than just that one night; the part of my brain trained to make observations, to gauge symptoms and reactions, kicked in, and I started registering all the things I had ignored or explained away before. Her occasional artificial energy. The evasiveness. The intense late-night visits to my room, where I’d thought we were connecting more deeply than ever before. I felt sick.

  “The other Darfri are not criminals. They are just tired of being treated as naughty children instead of respected. They are not hurting anyone. It was just a boat, surrounded by water.”

  “There could have been people aboard,” Kalina said slowly. She was regarding Hadrea with a baffled, hurt look, one echoed in my own heart. How could she have done this?

  “No one sleeps on a cargo boat, Kalina. And I would have felt them if they were. I could feel everything when I was using the drug. I knew it was safe.”

  “And what about the damage it did?”

  “It is an Ash boat,” she snapped. “They will cope just fine. The Ash family never stopped growing fat off our labor. One less boat will not hurt them.”

  “You used fresken, Hadrea,” I said. “After everything we’ve been trying to build, all the work your mother is doing, you’re just blowing it all up? No wonder An-Ostada was worried.” I looked at her flushed, defiant face, and felt like I was looking at a stranger.

  “This would not have happened if she would teach me properly! She calls me too ambitious, as if I am engaged in some petty inter-Guild jostle for position. She says I am impatient, as if not just wanting to learn but to hunger for it is not a desirable trait in a Speaker.”

  Kalina stayed calm, though I knew her well enough to recognize how much strain she was under. “I know the power was denied you, and you feel cheated, having lost that time. But An-Ostada was a Speaker chosen by all the others for her wisdom, and deemed suitable to be your instructor.”

  I knew at once she’d made a mistake. Hadrea seemed to grow larger in her rage. “Instructor? Pah! She expects to be our master!” Her words tumbled out in a rush. “She was holding me back on purpose. She learned things one way from her grandmother and she thinks that is the only way to have tah. It is not. I am not a child, to just practice rituals by rote. Every generation we have lost knowledge but she punishes me when I recognize new ways we might use power.”

  “Maybe she’s right to, if this is how you want to use yours!” I held back from shouting only because we were still outside, and anyone nearby might hear. “What were you thinking? You know how frightened people are of Darfri magic and how hard we’ve been working to reassure them that Speakers aren’t an army and fresken isn’t a weapon. How many times I’ve quashed rumors about Darfri assuming the accusers were just trying to cause trouble. If it gets out this was real, that undoes everything I’ve said, whether it’s true or not.”

  “And if I had not retained those relationships you would not have anyone who could speak to them for you now. You would not know this is not where your enemies lie. If I had stopped them burning the boat, do you think I would be invited in with them again? You do not just need the ordinary Darfri to keep this country safe, you need Darfri with power.”

  “We don’t need another civil war.” I shook my head, dazed, trying to get a grip on my anger, trying to reason with her. “Hadrea, the city is only still standing because of you. It owes you everything. We owe you. And I wouldn’t tell you how to practice your religion, you know I’ve never tried to intrude. But—”

  “You are intruding right now!” she retorted. “This has nothing to do with an attack on the Chancellor or on the ceremony tonight. You are wasting time worrying about your bickering Credol colleagues and a few burnt sacks of rice when there are more important things to be concerned with.”

>   “I don’t want to be concerned with fresken or the Darfri or spirits or anything else! But you’re being reckless, and you’re being secretive, and honor-down, Hadrea, I love you but I need to be able to trust you too!”

  She squared her jaw, and her voice went very cold. “I thought we did trust each other, Jovan.”

  A nasty laugh came out before I could stop myself. “If you trusted me you’d have talked to me about An-Ostada and what was going on. You’d have wanted my support. You’d have kept me informed about what was going on with the other students and the drugs and everything else, instead of letting me blunder around defending you in Council.” I couldn’t look at her, couldn’t look at Kalina, but the words kept coming all the same. “You always think you know better. No one’s ever on your team, are they? Hadrea against the world. I thought—” I stopped, not even wanting to finish in my head, let alone say it out loud.

  Kalina, stricken, touched my shoulder. “Jov, we’re running out of time.”

  I shook myself, tried to clear my head. She was right; we had no time for this. Tain was in danger. “Don’t go to the ceremony,” I said to Hadrea. “Just … just stay away, all right?” And I spun and left her standing there, a sour taste rising in my throat. She didn’t answer, and the silence of her stillness closed around me like fog as Kalina and I walked away.

  * * *

  “You’re staying here,” I told Dija, and then raised my voice over her loud objection to address the rest of the family, all decked out as they were in their last spring finery. “You’re all staying here. It’s not safe.”